Best Metaphor in a Political Science Paper

...perhaps ever. From"Musical Chairs: Pocketbook Voting and the Limits of Democratic Accountability," by Achen and Bartels:

First, the voters are poorly informed, as so many have noted. But second—and here we part company with the consensus—citizens cannot perform sensible retrospective judgments at election time. They reward and punish for events no administration can control. Moreover, while they know how they feel at the moment, they lose all track of how they have felt over the course of the administration’s term in office. Like medical patients recalling colonoscopies, their assessments of past pain and pleasure are significantly biased by “duration neglect” (Kahneman 2000; Redelmeier, Katz, and Kahneman 2003).